Project · 06

Star-Base Collectors Con

Convention identity · Custom illustration

Star-Base Collectors Con was a comic and collectors convention in Brownsville, Texas. The name came from something happening in the city itself: Starbase was taking shape near Brownsville, so the space connection was already built into the name.

I wanted to acknowledge that local connection without borrowing somebody else's visual identity. Instead of leaning on Tesla or SpaceX cues, I built the mark from its own pieces: an astronaut helmet, an orbital ring, a star field, and a city skyline. It reads as space, but it still belongs to the convention.

The central mark started as exploration in Procreate. I worked through several space ideas before the helmet became the container that could hold everything else. The skyline gives the mark a sense of place, while the orbit and stars carry the theme without turning the whole thing into a reference to another company.

For the wordmark I used Aviano because its wide, geometric forms felt appropriately science-fiction to me. The finished system could take on a galaxy texture for event graphics, but the underlying silhouette was built to stay recognizable when reduced to a simple one-color mark.

That was the balance I wanted: use what made Brownsville and the name timely, then give the convention a visual language of its own.